Top five Web-Based Invoicing Tools- Create & Send Invoices, It is Safe & Easy

f you are a small business owner, there are many concerns to attend to but one of the supreme fears of a many executives today is that the payment of their clients. Most corporate offices find the billing and invoicing a bit difficult. Most of the times you have to deal with different clients who want to pay and you must determine how much. Then, having done with it, you create an invoice electronically or printed and deliver or send via mail to the customer. You have to track when the invoices are already sent, paid, and follow up with those who need a reminder for that he could forget.

If you still use paper billing, it can be quite messy, and when problems arise, you need to browse and search all the paper records to verify the problem. It is already a waste of time and sometimes the present, work gets late and customer service failure. This scenario affects businesses, small or large. This is where the online billing and invoicing comes to your rescue and help you to send invoices and receive payments.

Some of the web portal understood this need and hence, created an application where you could create a free account and add more clients to start sending the bills. Between sending and managing invoices, tracking time and expenses, making calculations and instant form of billing there is no reason to buy boxes or drawers to store files and pounds and can easily be adjusted according to demand.

It also makes your workplace clean and green do not rely on the use of more paper. These applications are quite safe. The online billing system allows you to receive your payments on time and get to easily track your account. Web invoicing is crucial to any type of online business today. Many companies are involved in providing online billing & invoicing to a large number of people who are in online business today.

Here are some of the online billing services to create and send invoices easily and safely.

1. Invoicera




Invoicera is one of the most popular online invoicing and billing software / applications to companies, service providers and professionals, which gives them great experience in creating, sending invoices and processing of numerous transaction tasks. Invoicera, wonderful application is the perfect combination of three key features, such as online billing, invoicing and time tracking solution, together with other additional surprising properties.

Other striking features supported by Invoicera are-:

Invoice Scheduling
Time and Expense Tracking
Multiple Payment Gateways support.
Set periodic tasks to do.
Multiple Language and Currency Support
Recurring invoices with Auto Billing
Apply late fees payment to invoices
Access Invoicera from Google Apps
Customize your Invoice Templates.
Send invoices as PDF, e-mail or have clients access them
Online Report generation of invoices, clients, payments etc
With Invoicera, you can have complete control over your invoices. Its interface is easy to use, but professional invoices in fact make it one of the best online invoicing applications.


2. CurdBee




CurdBee is an online system, which aims to take the hassle out of billing and invoicing for small businesses and freelancers. When you are working with CurdBee, designing professional invoices and estimates is as simple as uploading the company’s logo and selecting a color model.

5 Resources to Find Seasoned, Expiring Domains

One of the biggest areas I have worked to grow my expertise and portfolio is in securing both new and expired domains. I have admit I have bought a number of domains on the spur of the moment and regretted it at a later stage I still find it a much under appreciated area of online marketing. I have listed 5 great platforms that I have had others recommend or I use on a daily basis to grow my domain property portfolio.

DomainsBot


One of the fellow guest stay on search contributors Kristi Hines in her recent SEJ recommended a new platform DomainsBot but I haven’t used before. After spending sometime looking at it’s features and advanced search options DomainsBot is a fairly decent platform. The reasons are that DomainsBot is unique as it’s one of the few that offers a fairly wide global reach for finding a great domain name amoung a number of popular domain extensions and some great advanced search options.

Advanced Domain Search Options include:

Add Synonym
View Only Extensions: Com,Net,Org,Co,Info,Biz,Us,Mobi,Me,Asia
Status: Available,Expiring,For Sale
Include: Hyphens,Numbers,Related,Compound,Variation,BadWords
Language: Auto, English, German, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese
Limitations of the DomainsBot platform is that while it offers .me and .asia domain extensions it does not support these language sets. One other area would be appreciated if they could expand the number of extensions supported to include AU,UK and EU domains.

SEDO



One of the largest domain platforms Sedo also offers some features for those looking to secure a decent domain from their huge database of listings. The downside is that their domain search platform is heavily focused on direct domain sales and their auction platform but also suggests those that are still available to be registered so not all is lost.

Advanced Domain Search Options include:

Extensions: upto 420
Languages: English,Spanish,French,German
Domain Length: All, upto 12 characters and over 12 characters
Number of Words: all, upto 5 words, over 5 words
Price range: EUR,USD,GBP
Categories:Top level, level 1, level 2
Date Added
Traffic
Listing Type: buy now, negotiable, marketplace, auction
Special characters: hyphens,digits,IDN domains
Domains/Websites: domains,websites,both
Safe Search: off,on
Being one of the largest domain registrars offers them the ability to have the largest range of domain extensions. The limtations are the overly complex search functions, confusing menu structures and an inability to catch dropped/expired domains.

FreshDrop



One of the newer platform that requires a monthly subscription to make full use of their service is FreshDrop, the free version is great but you need to experience it’s full potential. The interesting aspect of their domain search platform is the hourly scans of the domain registrars.

Supported Domain Registrars you can search include

GoDaddy
Fabulous.com
Afternic
eBay
SEDO
Dynadot
SnapNames
NameJet
Pool.com
The only issue that the domain while appearing to be very powerful is a little technical and may not be suitable for new enterants to the domain market. It’s one of the only platform that has a wonderful tour feature that explains all the functionality and features available to find domains.

DomainTools



One of the most power platforms is Domain Tools Monitor, I have been using for a number of years to monitor both my own domains, those I have a vested interest in and those belonging to clients. One of the key aspects of staying on top of domains is using automated domain monitoring tools where possible.

Some of the cool features that you might want to checkout include

Registrant Alert – monitor whois record for any newly registered, renewed or deleted
Name Server Alert – monitor daily activity on all major TLDs on any name server with fewer than 50,000 domains whenever there is a new domain added or a domain deleted
Trademark Alert – monitor activity on your alert word or string of words and be notified when they are about to be registered or deleted
Domain Monitor – advises of expiration dates, status changes or updates to Whois records
One of the other features to use platforms like DomainTools is to check the Whois details on the domain due to drop to understand more about who owned the domain, what was the site profile, other matching general TLDs and some details on what other domains they own.

NetFleet


One of the platforms i’ve been testing is NetFleet Alerts which mostly focuses on AU domains but allows me to automatically monitor both domains listed for sale and domains due to expire/drop. Their free keyword alert service sends me an email alerts when a domain matches the industry, market or niche that i’m monitoring.

The domain alert settings require

Keyword or domain names monitored
Alert type: standard, expired aftermarket
Notification frequency: daily, weekly
The limitations of the platform is that the automatic classification of the domain niche is not always accurate, but the ease at which you can quickly scan the notification is brilliant.

Go out and start building your portfolio

My best piece of advice is it’s a great idea to try and pick a platform that works for you but if you centralise your domain purchases with one registrar to get a bigger discount. To ensure fail safes are in place always use more than one monitoring platform where possible and ideally pick a solution for it’s strengths. I hope all these suggestions and platforms makes it easier for you to start expanding your domain portfolio.

How to Generate Extra Cash from Your Top Exit Pages

While I work for websites, one of the most important statistics that I keep my eyes on is the exit pages. Yes, it’s extremely important to know from which pages on a website or a blog people are exiting most. Exits from web pages can be both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’.

When it’s Positive
Exiting is common or positive after visitors have completed a conversion activity like signing up for your newsletter or buying one of your products. For example, exiting from the thank-you pages are positive, as visitors leave your website only after taking a specific action.

When it’s Negative
It is not always the case when people leave your website or blog after completing an action. They may also leave your webpage without completing a conversion activity. Now, this is negative. And when the number of exit pages on your site is too high, that means you have a higher bounce rate. This is major cause of worry. When users leave immediately from non-goal pages, you need to take some action to figure out what’s confusing visitors.

Why ‘Top Exit Pages’ is an Important Metric
There’s no doubt that website analytics tools like Google analytics do a great job by informing you about the top exit pages on your site, along with the bounce rate and the time spent on site by users. The exit page stats help website publishers to find out which pages on a specific website need more attention. Of course, web pages from which users leave most need some careful optimization to ensure visitors spend more time on your website or blog.

By optimizing your exit pages, you can immediately optimize your website for increasing the time spent on site and increasing the rate of conversion. Exit page optimization increases the overall value of your website and compels users to spend more time on the site.

Monetization Techniques
If you see that exit from some pages on your website is actually logical, the best idea to focus on monetizing the traffic that it receives. Thanks to the availability of options like Google AdSense, you can generate some extra cash from pages that have a high exit rate.

First of all, you need to prepare a list of all the high exit pages on your site. Next, you can start placing AdSense on those pages to earn extra cash. Putting AdSense on pages with high exit and bounce rates can be a good idea until it doesn’t impact the overall rate of conversion.

If the ads that you run on high rate exit pages are relevant, it can also add value to the content on your site. It gives you an opportunity to monetize the outgoing traffic that would already be leaving.

The best part of using AdSense is that they are not going to change the pattern of your business model. These ads in fact help you to generate cash by monetizing the traffic that are already exiting your site. Running these ads can immediately increase the overall revenue of your website.

Suggestions for Running Ads
The best piece of advice is to start with just a couple of exit pages. Once you are sure that placing ads on high exit rate pages doesn’t have a negative impact on your relevant traffic, you can place the ads on more pages and start earning good cash from the website.

Are you already running ads on your web pages? Does it impact the relevant traffic that your website receives? Please feel free to share your tips on how you are generating cash through AdSense without affecting your core users.

How to get the Most Out of Social Media Connections – It’s Not All About Traffic

Advertising on Facebook quadrupled last year. More than three-quarters of big American companies use some sort of social networking, and most small businesses take off from social media-induced traffic. It’s clear that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and their contemporaries are becoming vital to businesses, regardless of size. But it’s not a popularity contest. It’s never been.

Anthony Miyazaki, global marketing professor at Florida International University, thinks that most social media professionals are taking the wrong approach to social media. Those “Likes” and fan pages are well and good, but they’re just the start. If you leave it at that, your fans are nothing but names and numbers. What you need to do, he says, is make a real connection with these people.

Give and take

The beauty of social media is that it goes both ways. Before this kind of networking came along, online marketers were content to harvest e-mail addresses and send out newsletters. Social networking allows people to be more than passive receivers—it lets them speak to companies the way they never could with TV advertisers. Take advantage of this when using social media, Miyazaki says. Readers like to be heard and feel valued. It says a lot about how you see your customers when the stage is wide open, but you don’t let them on.

Make friends

People feel better about buying (and are thus more likely to buy again) when they feel they’re helping a friend. Social networking allows you to do just that. Users like to link themselves to brands or products that they personally like, and participate in their polls and contests because they feel they’re part of a community. More friends doesn’t mean more customers, but the customers you do get are likely to stay.


Don’t flood

One of the biggest mistakes in social networking is flooding users with content. No matter how useful your content is, if there’s too much of it, people will turn away. I’ve “unliked” brands on Facebook not because I don’t like product or the company, but because they flood my page with updates. Limit Facebook and Twitter updates to one or two a day, unless you have breaking news.

Tell, not sell

Regular, useful content is still king—social media is just another medium for it. Users can spot blind marketing from a mile away, and straight-up promotion without any informative content (“Buy this product now!”) is a dead giveaway. Offer something to your readers before bringing your product into the picture. Remember, people turn to social network for information. If you establish yourself as a source of information, you’re in a much better place to sell.

Take your time

Overnight successes aren’t unheard of, but they aren’t the norm. Accept the fact that most of us will have to earn our popularity. Lay out a long-term marketing plan that involves slowly gaining people’s trust, rather than jumping into it and waiting for the fans to come. This will keep you from overdoing it when you think it’s going slow, and give you room to adjust when your needs or interests change. If you’re lucky, you just might be the exception and make it big in a week, but don’t pressure yourself—stay on track and you’ll get there.

How to get the Most Out of Social Media Connections – It’s Not All About Traffic

Advertising on Facebook quadrupled last year. More than three-quarters of big American companies use some sort of social networking, and most small businesses take off from social media-induced traffic. It’s clear that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and their contemporaries are becoming vital to businesses, regardless of size. But it’s not a popularity contest. It’s never been.

Anthony Miyazaki, global marketing professor at Florida International University, thinks that most social media professionals are taking the wrong approach to social media. Those “Likes” and fan pages are well and good, but they’re just the start. If you leave it at that, your fans are nothing but names and numbers. What you need to do, he says, is make a real connection with these people.

Give and take

The beauty of social media is that it goes both ways. Before this kind of networking came along, online marketers were content to harvest e-mail addresses and send out newsletters. Social networking allows people to be more than passive receivers—it lets them speak to companies the way they never could with TV advertisers. Take advantage of this when using social media, Miyazaki says. Readers like to be heard and feel valued. It says a lot about how you see your customers when the stage is wide open, but you don’t let them on.

Make friends

People feel better about buying (and are thus more likely to buy again) when they feel they’re helping a friend. Social networking allows you to do just that. Users like to link themselves to brands or products that they personally like, and participate in their polls and contests because they feel they’re part of a community. More friends doesn’t mean more customers, but the customers you do get are likely to stay.


Don’t flood

One of the biggest mistakes in social networking is flooding users with content. No matter how useful your content is, if there’s too much of it, people will turn away. I’ve “unliked” brands on Facebook not because I don’t like product or the company, but because they flood my page with updates. Limit Facebook and Twitter updates to one or two a day, unless you have breaking news.

Tell, not sell

Regular, useful content is still king—social media is just another medium for it. Users can spot blind marketing from a mile away, and straight-up promotion without any informative content (“Buy this product now!”) is a dead giveaway. Offer something to your readers before bringing your product into the picture. Remember, people turn to social network for information. If you establish yourself as a source of information, you’re in a much better place to sell.

Take your time

Overnight successes aren’t unheard of, but they aren’t the norm. Accept the fact that most of us will have to earn our popularity. Lay out a long-term marketing plan that involves slowly gaining people’s trust, rather than jumping into it and waiting for the fans to come. This will keep you from overdoing it when you think it’s going slow, and give you room to adjust when your needs or interests change. If you’re lucky, you just might be the exception and make it big in a week, but don’t pressure yourself—stay on track and you’ll get there.

Traditional SEO to Social, What Matters?

Have you ever wondered how Twitter links and updates play into search results? A recent study by Michael Stelzner on small business social media use reported, 88% of all marketers found social media helps get them increase exposure. But where is this exposure coming from? Search? Bookmarking? Social Sharing? As marketers and business professionals, we’ve all heard how great social media is for brand awareness, but what effect does social sharing on Twitter have on search indexing?

Traditionally SEO was a clear cut process. You could change your web page, resubmit this information to Google, and a day later you would be ranking better. A link placed on another site directed to your site gave you value (appearing in search) if it was “SEO friendly.” To help you understand how fragmented the SEO landscape is, lets say a college textbook was written exclusively on SEO, it would likely only have about 4 key chapters:

Website Structure
Keyword Research
Link Building
Best Practices

Fortunately most SEO information is written on the web; because if it was print based , the information would have to be re-written just about every month. Social media would fall under a philosophy subsection because relatively little is known about social and search; but as their relationship grows it’s becoming evident that the social media and search are bonding. We have speculated its validity before, but now we are seeing small samples of how sharing, specifically through Twitter with URL shortened links work to positively impact SEO rankings.


So, whether you are a traditionalist SEO expert or a new wave social media guru, it seems that both of your skills are relevant in search. Traditional link building is still important, but it seems that social link building on Twitter may be just as relevant. Be sure to incorporate elements of social in your SEO strategy and elements of SEO in your social strategy.

Image Credit: Ross Social





More from StayOnSearch

How To Measure Social Media ROI
How SEO and Social Media Are Joining Forces
5 Social Media Faux Pas Affecting Your SEO
Connect to Social Apps in Gmail With Google Buzz
StayOnSearch Recommends

What is SEO (Practical SEO)
What is SEO from the Link Building Perspective (Practical SEO)
How to SEO your Blog Titles (BlogGlue)

Online Business Owners and Social Media: Listening is Branding

Whenever we hear branding, what comes into our minds is its comprising entities—aesthetics, logo design, typefaces, and color contrast. However, in social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter (knowing that we cannot alter their layout and aesthetics), branding yourself as a business should not only be confined within these descriptions.

To start a social media account literally means we have to start from nothing. And without having the means and right to alter a social media layout, the only thing you can do to start a network is by listening.

Online business owners are not only Internet lurkers. They go out, they study their niche, and they listen. For example, selling second hand books does not mean you just have to Google every book in your product list. Although it is good, you still have to delve deeper to your market and to your niche. And listening starts with knowing your products, joining forums that will help you cultivate your knowledge about it, and personally talking to people that have vast knowledge of your niche.

Social Media Listening, Making a Positive Noise through it

Your network (or followers) is not only display figures to make your social media site busy and active. There is no point of having a hundred thousand followers without interacting with them, or else, you will end up deleted on their accounts.

·Consider your follower’s tweet and updates as a research work

Consider every tweet and update—whether it is banter or a serious rant over your products or anything—as research work to understand your market on a deeper sense. Knowing their unadulterated thoughts about something is the best way to know them beyond marketing books and clichés.

·Comment threading is an expanded give-away study

Seeing how your followers connect and communicate with each other is like having a free thesis book of their behavior. Through this, you will see the language they are using, and how they think as active entities of your business. As a business owner, you need to understand your target market’s behavior inside a relationship, for it will give you hints how to properly brand yourself and think of future design and innovations for your products and services.

Frankly, we online business owners have frank Goals, too

To say that we are listening and interacting with our future clients because we want to change the world (as Donald Trump brags) is truly one melodramatic reason to transform the hearts of our prospects. We can also make it as a staple quote on our websites to attract more customers. However, we online business owners have frank goals, as well. And frankly speaking, we listen because we have a product to sell and a message to deliver. So use it very carefully, for you do not want to end up homeless and dying in hunger.

More from StayOnSearch

Create a Custom Social Media Dashboard with Metricly
Using Social Media to Build Your Ecommerce Business
How SEO and Social Media Are Joining Forces
Why Target Niche Positioning is Essential to Online Marketing Success
StayOnSearch Recommends

Social Media for Business – The Big Picture (Straight North)
Leveraging Relevance and Social Media to Get Noticed (BlogGlue)

How Your Web Hosting Service Can Affect Your SEO

Although high quality content and authoritative, relevant inbound links are the primary SEO concerns for most site owners, choosing an optimal web hosting service may be more important than some realize.

First and Foremost: The Administrative Panel
One of your top priorities when choosing a web hosting service is the quality and features of the hosting company’s administrative panel. An administrative panel is a control panel that has numerous tools and features, some of which are designed to promote search engine optimization. High quality web hosting services offer an administrative panel that maximizes your site’s SEO by formatting its code in a way that appeals to search engine bots, which subsequently determine your page rank.

Administrative panels also offer open source control features and content management tools that directly integrate with external SEO applications. Look for a web hosting service that automatically inserts meta tags and title tags, which are necessary components of SEO, on each page of your site.

After choosing a web hosting service with an SEO-friendly administrative panel, search for web applications that are compatible with the panel. These applications can help to automate your SEO effort. For example, you might install a web application that simultaneously posts the contents of your site to social bookmarking sites. This generates valuable inbound links that increase your search engine rankings.

Can Shared Hosting Services with Spammers Harm Your Rankings?
Many web hosting companies offer shared hosting services, which allow as many as thousands of unique domain names to exist on a single IP address and share the same pool of bandwidth and storage space. Large e-commerce sites and domains that deal primarily with multimedia often prefer dedicated hosting services that attach only one domain name to an IP address. This is because Google search engine bots now consider factors such as page loading speed and overall site performance when determining search engine rankings. However, a typical blog normally doesn’t justify the added costs of dedicated hosting, since its relatively small size and lack of multimedia content allows it to run quickly even with an inexpensive, low-bandwidth hosting plan. This is especially true of web hosting services that offer Ruby hosting and other packages based on modernized web programming languages.

In some cases, however, using a shared hosting service that also hosts spammer websites (i.e. pornography and sites designed to trick search engine bots) can be harmful to your search engine rankings. Usually, search engine bots don’t view your site negatively if only a few spammer sites share your hosting space. However, if your website is the one of the only legitimate domains among a shared hosting service dominated by spammers, Google and other search engines may become suspicious.

When in doubt, it’s best to ask your web hosting service for information regarding the amount of spammer sites located on their shared hosting IP addresses.

Server Downtime and its Consequences
Your SEO efforts can be quickly nullified if you choose a web hosting service that frequently experiences server downtime. During server downtime, potential clients will be unable to access your site – and the same goes for search engine bots. When a search engine bot attempts to cache your site during server downtime, it may not affect your rankings immediately. However, when this happens repeatedly, it indicates to Google and other search engines that your site may not be reliable, or worse – that it may have been inactive even between the attempted search engine bot crawls. This, understandably, can seriously damage your rankings and can even cause Google to display an “unavailable” error message as your site’s meta description in search engine results.

There are many things you can do to combat the negative effects of server downtime on your website, some of which may lead to a search for a new web hosting service:

Use an uptime monitor, such as Pingdom Uptime Monitoring, to determine how much downtime your site experiences. If your site’s uptime is lower than what’s guaranteed by your web hosting service, contact the host’s customer support team to resolve the issue.
File a ticket with your web hosting service as soon as your site goes down. You may be able to configure your uptime monitor to do this automatically.
Use proper server downtime codes and redirect codes for scheduled downtime. This will allow search engine bots to differentiate between planned downtime for maintenance and unplanned downtime due to a system failure, the latter of which is more damaging to your SEO.
Install Google Webmaster Tools to determine the cause of downtime. Common causes include hackers, the term “Disallow:/” being included in your robots.txt file, and other page crawl errors that confuse search engine bots.
Regularly test your server’s response time. If HTTP requests are frequently timing out, your search engine rankings could drop even though your site is currently experiencing uptime.
Ensure that your domain name’s registration is updated. You can easily resolve this by setting your registration to auto-renew.
Does the Geographical Location of Your Hosting Company Affect Your Rankings?
The short answer is yes, but it isn’t necessarily a top priority. As mentioned previously, your domain name is attached to an IP address. This IP address indicates the location of your hosting server. If your hosting server is located in Germany, for example, Google will assume that your site caters to German Internet users. However, other factors, such as the language used on your site, can change the way that Google prioritizes search results according to location as well. This is also reflected in your site’s domain name. For example, .com sites are understood to be U.S.-focused by Google, while domains ending in co.uk generally indicate a bias for users in the United Kingdom.

If your website caters primarily to customers in and around your immediate geographical location, it’s optimal to choose a web hosting service that has a server located near your area of business.

Optimizing your website’s content with geo-tagging can offset the problems posed by utilizing a non-local web hosting service. Geo-tagging is the process of inserting geographical keywords into your content. For example, a website for a Cleveland-based marketing firm will benefit from keywords related to Cleveland and Ohio. Geo-tagging is even recommended for sites that do benefit from a locally based web hosting service.